


To The Neighborhood

by fluffernutter8



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, POV Outsider, Steggy Positivity Week 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 08:13:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15360093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: New neighbors always have the potential to disrupt things, and the couple fixing up the monstrosity across the street seems more capable of disruption than most.





	To The Neighborhood

When the sign at number six, Meadow Close, switches from For Sale to Sale Pending, Dr. Valerie Oglethorpe, DDS, (please feel free to call her Dr. Oglethorpe) is of two minds. On the one hand, number six is currently an elaborate ruin of a house, a confection of turrets and too many windows neglected for so long that it can hardly be called a Victorian anymore, and new owners would certainly mean repairs so that Dr. Oglethorpe will no longer have to look out at such a blight on her street. On the other hand, the owners of numbers one through four have all been confirmed to be calm, normal people who leave for work somewhere between seven and eight, return between five thirty and six thirty, keep their lawns tidy, and never make a fuss except for the occasional barbecue, which suits Dr. Oglethorpe extremely well. With new neighbors, one is never certain what the outcome might be, and the purchase of such an impractical house is already a poor sign.

But the real estate agents and bank representatives don’t consult current residents about these sorts of things, so when the sign changes again from Sale Pending to Sold, Dr. Oglethorpe decides that she will make the best of whatever situation arises.

She happens to be out in her garden the first time a car pulls up in front of number six. Dr. Oglethorpe’s garden is extremely elaborate, with all the typical vegetables and flowers alongside multiple rare and interesting plants, and many of them are blooming in the late spring weather, forming a lush barrier which surrounds her property.

All that is to say that when Dr. Oglethorpe can see the new couple and they cannot see her, it is not spying in the traditional sense. It is certainly not purposeful. It would just become extremely awkward if she were to get up and make a spectacle of herself, so she stays quiet and still and watches them.

They are both on the taller side, and well-built. The man’s hair is blond, and the woman’s a lovely rich brown. Dr. Oglethorpe might not have the best eyesight anymore, but even from a distance she can tell that they are both quite good-looking. They stand side by side, peering up at the house. The woman puts her hands on her hips and says something that makes the man laugh, and then he takes her hand and they walk inside.

Dr. Oglethorpe seizes the opportunity to return to her own home. She’s finished her weeding, and of course the two of them will be back outside eventually and she isn’t sure she’s ready to greet them just yet. Better to get the reckoning of them first.

That her kitchen window offers an excellent view is, of course, coincidence. As, naturally, is the way her eyes look across the street throughout the morning, even though nothing visibly happens for a long while. Finally, towards mid-afternoon, the couple comes back out, arm in arm, returns to their car, and drives away.

Dr. Oglethorpe gives them decent markings for the first day, but she’s perfectly willing to reevaluate depending on what type of people these turn out to be.

* * *

There’s a near immediate drop in estimation the next time the couple appears. It is close to a week later when they drive up again, and they are accompanied by someone driving a pick-up truck with a construction company logo on the side. This time the man is dressed casually, in jeans and a slightly disheveled T-shirt. The woman has her hair covered by a bandana. Standing at the kitchen sink and distractedly rewashing the breakfast dishes, Dr. Oglethorpe gives reluctant approval to the idea that they are people with specific vision and a hands-on approach. They must be giving the construction chief an overview of the house before he begins with his crew, and she does appreciate that they’re dressed appropriately for wandering around what must be a pit of dust and mold and falling pieces of wood and wallpaper.

But after about an hour, once she is back at the kitchen table with a crossword, she hears an engine start up, and instead of seeing the couple drive away, it’s the man in the truck. The bed is empty, so he’s clearly unloaded his supplies and left them at the house, and when the sounds of a hammer and - mercy - a saw, begin, Dr. Oglethorpe is faced with the nasty truth.

Do-it-yourselfers. Fixing a loose hinge or installing an air conditioner on your own is one thing, but amateurs taking on a whole house? Dr. Oglethorpe certainly cannot approve.

* * *

Over the next weeks, Dr. Oglethorpe learns a few things. The woman’s name is Peggy. The man’s is Steve. They are very eager workers, arriving in the morning just after the last of the other neighbors have left for their offices, and driving off just before they return. They laugh with each other quite a bit - she can hear them no matter where they are in the house because of the broken windows - and they were polite enough to leave a note in her mailbox apologizing for the noise and mess, as if she were unaware that houses getting repaired will have a noisy, messy intermediary stage. She does not, of course, respond to the note.

She also learns that they have a large and eclectic group of friends who apparently lack regular jobs too.

Steve and Peggy work alone for about a week, wandering between the interior and exterior seemingly depending on weather and mood. But the following Monday, a back door to their car opens instead of just the front two and a man with shaggy brown hair pulled halfway back steps out. He stands on the sidewalk to look up at the house. Dr. Oglethorpe just catches a glimpse as she prunes a rosebush, but she thinks the man has some sort of prosthesis. She quickly applies herself back to the bush, making sure not to look up again until the three have gone into the house.

She can’t hear exactly what is being said, but there is indignant shouting, and a yelled response which is immediately followed by laughter, so she knows it’s playful.

Dr. Oglethorpe listens, but she can’t hear a difference in noise level signalling an extra hammer or a new set of boots on the floor. Perhaps the new man is just observing, or maybe she’s gotten used to the racket. 

A few days later, a second car arrives in the morning. Steve, Peggy, their long-haired friend, and an African-American man come out of the first car, and a redheaded woman steps out of the other one.

The newest man elbows the barely kempt friend. Dr. Oglethorpe is checking on her pansies this morning, which are planted in a neat row at the front edge of her lawn, and the man has a carrying voice, so she is able to hear him say, “We usually don’t agree on much, but you’re right: this is a Project.”

Dr. Oglethorpe is not given to figures of speech, but imagines that she can actually hear the way he capitalizes the word. She quite agrees with him, actually.

Project or not, the newcomers roll up their sleeves and join in. To give them the benefit of the doubt, Dr. Oglethorpe will assume they are focusing on working from the outside in because she has seen very little improvement thus far, although they certainly are committed.

Peggy and Steve are there every weekday with the two men and the redhead as their most frequent assistants, but a new cast begins to rotate in as well. There’s a man who balances on the roof and spends two days removing shingles and then three fixing rotten pieces and replacing everything fresh. Dr. Oglethorpe keeps one horrified eye on him whether she’s inside or out because he works without a harness and spends much of his time making sarcastic remarks down to the ground or in through the windows instead of focusing on the task at hand. There’s a young woman who speaks accented English and has what Dr. Oglethorpe considers a suspiciously easy time lifting and carrying things; she remembers a piece on National Public Radio from several years ago about female bodybuilders, but the woman seems too slight for that. Occasionally a man drops by who has cropped blond hair, a boisterous voice and manner, and the most enjoyment from swinging a hammer that Dr. Oglethorpe has ever seen. (It’s getting hot, and he wears a sleeveless shirt. She would certainly believe that he could be a bodybuilder.)

Dr. Oglethorpe’s favorite and least favorite days are when a shiny sedan screeches up mid-morning. She quickly becomes familiar with the dark haired man who acts taller than he is, the bright, controlled, blonde woman, and their three children, who pile puppylike out of the car and run shrieking into the house. There’s always much chaos when the family is around, but something about the energy is catching, too. Dr. Oglethorpe sometimes finds herself humming when the little ones are around the site, and she is distinctly not in the habit of such things.

Perhaps to the other residents of Meadow Close, things at number six progress quickly. Popping in and out as they do, seeing the house mostly in pale or waning light on the way to or from the car - perhaps they imagine it like a flip book. Dr. Oglethorpe, on the other hand, is surprised when she goes out with her trowel and her sunhat one morning and finds that she has an actual house across the street from her. After much sampling and flicking around of paint, Peggy and Steve chose a rich green for the main body of the house, although there were plenty of Victorian frills and finishings to which everyone has added accent colors. Dr. Oglethorpe can pick out yellow, rose, and beige, and while one might be forgiven for wondering if it might look haphazard with so many people chipping in, it actually looks quite well done, at least from a distance. Dr. Oglethorpe chalks this up to Peggy standing outside with a plan in hand and directing the whole lot of them.

There are a few days where the house just rests on its own, and Dr. Oglethorpe thinks that she should take advantage of the respite before Steve and Peggy officially move in. She reads the New York Times in full the way she has every day since she married in 1960. She does the crossword completely, in pen, and makes a grocery list for when she does her shopping tomorrow. She goes out to the garden, as always. But it is all too quiet. She ends up bringing out a portable radio and tuning it to the classical station. She knows that listening to music is good for the plants; so interesting that she hadn’t tried this years ago.

Peggy and Steve move their furniture in on a Friday. Dr. Oglethorpe watches it come out of the truck, much of it in Steve’s apparently extremely strong arms, though Peggy certainly carries her share as well. They’ve chosen solid pieces, vintage, she supposes one calls it these days, although Dr. Oglethorpe prefers to just think of it as classic and well-constructed. They have everything inside by the afternoon, and presumably are arranging things until fairly late; the house is lit up, but the newly installed windows make it hard to hear the scrapings of furniture or the conversation of her new neighbors.

* * *

Saturday morning, Dr. Oglethorpe rises at 7:30, her weekend wakeup time, and knows that she will have to bake something. She takes down the old recipe book and finds the instructions for a coffee cake. It is out of the oven by 9, but she leaves it to rest until 10 because she isn’t certain how late young people sleep these days. But surely any later than that would be absurd...

At 10:05, Dr. Oglethorpe, dressed in a blouse and skirt, climbs the steps at number six for the first time and rings the doorbell. It has a pleasant chime, and she’s glad it worked out; she heard someone cursing a blue streak for an entire afternoon while fiddling with the wiring.

“Good morning,” says Dr. Oglethorpe when Peggy comes to the door looking fresh in a silky T-shirt and jeans. Despite the modern clothing, she looks not like the image on the cover of a grocery store checkout magazine, but like the composed, inviting, friendly women in the catalogs of the 1950s. “I’m Dr. Oglethorpe. I suppose we’re neighbors now.”

“Peggy Carter,” says Peggy, and Dr. Oglethorpe tries to arrange her face into polite interest, as if this is new information. “It’s lovely to meet you.”

Dr. Oglethorpe hefts up her cargo, presenting the cake for inspection. ““Likewise. I’ve brought a cake, to welcome you to the street.”

“How kind.” Peggy takes the cake with care. Dr. Oglethorpe is proud at the way the cinnamon wafts enticingly through the air. Peggy glances over her shoulder. “Perhaps I could wait to serve it? We’re having a housewarming tomorrow, and you would be welcome to come meet my husband and our friends. It could also serve as a bit of an apology for the mess we’ve been making over the past few months.”

“How kind,” Dr. Oglethorpe echoes, hitching her handbag strap over her shoulder. “But I really couldn’t intrude.” She doesn’t mention that she hasn’t eaten sweets since her husband, Dr. Martin Oglethorpe, DMD, (please feel free to call him Marty, everyone did) who was the baker between them, passed away. Instead, she backs off the porch quickly, before Peggy can protest. “Enjoy the cake.”

Returned to her own familiar kitchen, Dr. Oglethorpe replays the interaction. She has been watching Peggy for all these months, and she didn’t know until just now that she has a warm, full smile, and a glint in her eye that reminds Dr. Oglethorpe of sneaking out at night, giggling, with her sister Laurel.

It is obvious when the time for the housewarming approaches. The now-familiar cars pull up, dispelling the now-familiar cast of regulars, along with some new faces. Steve or Peggy pulls open the door for each new arrival, and a cheer goes up from inside the house every time.

Around the three, as Steve comes out of the house, calling over his shoulder back through the front door before getting into the car and driving off, Dr. Oglethorpe walks into the garden. She’s elected to take advantage of the slightly cooler weather now that the sun has started to move from the top of the sky. She checks her irrigation system carefully, and looks over the last of her summer vegetables to make sure that they haven’t been revisited by bugs.

Everything looks fine, but she notices that her flower beds are getting a bit bedraggled and decides to go get her shears to do some deadheading.

Dr. Oglethorpe is, as might be expected, extremely familiar with her lawn. But sometimes an animal, not realizing that it is trespassing in her domain, will make some unexpected changes.

The burrow catches her by such surprise that she falls before she can even feel startled, but by the time she is on the ground, she’s quite aware of the pain. For a moment, she regrets not having one of those emergency call buttons that her daughter Joan (Dr. Oglethorpe hasn’t been allowed to call her Joanie in years) recommends when she makes her monthly call from Columbus, or at least a cellular phone.

She is looking around, trying to find something to support her so she can make her way into the house and call for medical attention, when she hears a voice say, “Hello?”

Her immediate instinct is to stay very quiet and hope that the person goes away. But then she remembers that some assistance would actually be, for once, appreciated. “Hello,” she calls back, trying to sound firm about it.

A moment later, Steve finds his way up her front path and around her bushes. He has a large bag of ice in one arm.

“Sorry to intrude, but my wife sent me out on an errand,” he says, gesturing to the bag, “and I just drove back up and thought I heard a sound.”

Dr. Oglethorpe hadn’t thought that she had made much of a sound (she fell on grass, and she is a fairly light person) but it’s convenient all the same. “Yes,” she says. “I just had a bit of a tumble. If you wouldn’t mind helping me up, I’ll go in the house and call emergency services.”

“Oh.” Steve looks troubled. “Can I wait with you until they come? I heard on the radio that there was some kind of accident on the highway, and I think the ambulances might be a little tied up, so it could be a while.” He brightens. “Or you could come wait with us across the street. There are plenty of people, and now plenty of ice.”

His smile is very charming, but Dr. Oglethorpe has remained unswayed by even better ones. (Perhaps not, but it sounds good. Up close he is both very attractive, and increasingly familiar, although she can’t quite place from where...)

Aiming for calm conviction, she says, “Thank you for the offer, but if you’ll just give a hand, I think I’ll be fine.”

Though looking troubled again, Steve continues balancing the sack of ice in one hand and manages to politely but firmly wrap an arm around her waist and pull her to her feet. She sways for a moment, leaning on him more than she expected to, but then regains her balance and gives a nod to indicate that they can start to move across the grass.

He is very careful to skirt her various plants, which she appreciates. After a moment, he says, “I’m sorry if I didn’t introduce myself before, Dr. Oglethorpe. I’m Steve. Steve Rogers. I think you met my wife Peggy this morning.”

“Oh yes.” Dr. Oglethorpe says it as if she meets pretty new women with glints in their eyes all the time. “She seems nice.”

“Better than I deserve,” he says, and unlike so many men Dr. Oglethorpe has met in her time, including her son-in-law, he sounds as if he means it. “There was a while—years, actually—when I didn’t think we’d get to have any of this." There’s something distant and haunted lurking in his tone. Then he shakes his head to chase it away and finishes, “I know just how lucky I am to be her husband.”

They’re moving slowly - Dr. Oglethorpe wasn’t very good at hopping when she was a spry young thing, and now each new jump requires a gathering of energy and a slight jarring of her ever more fragile bones - and Steve seems as if he wants to simply carry her, but she stares determinedly forward and continues.

“Your garden is amazing,” he says after a few moments. “How long have you had it?”

“Marty— Martin— My husband and I moved to the street in 1962, just after they’d completed our house. Yours was already there, of course,” she adds. “It’s historic; they couldn’t tear it down, so they built the street around it instead. Anyway, I knew that I wanted a garden, so I started with just some simple local flowers and a few vegetables, and continued from there.”

“Did you grow up with a garden?”

“Oh.” This is more small talk than she was expecting. “In a manner of speaking. I was a child during the war, the Second World War, and it was recommended that every family start growing their own produce.”

“Sure,” he says with a nod. “Victory gardens.”

“Are you a student of history?”

“You could say that.” She notices for the first time a bit of a glint like the one in Peggy’s eyes.

She shakes her head and continues, leaning on him more heavily as they switch from the grass to the less forgiving stone of the path. “I grew up in the city so we only had a little patch in front of my house, and a few window boxes, but looking after them came to be my favorite chore. Of course,” she says, eager that he be clear about this, “growing your own food was never as important in this country as it was in other places.” Her mother’s family had been English, and her father still had cousins in Holland, and the stories that they told, even years after the war, about rationing and grass soup and children making themselves sick on rich food after VE Day, had been dreadful. “But every little bit helped, and I became quite proud of the things I’d grown.”

“The flowers are also beautiful,” he says, gesturing with the hand encumbered by the ice, which is now beginning to drip down his arm. “We finished up the house pretty nicely, but I’ve been thinking about the landscaping. Peggy - my wife -” She likes the way he smiles a bit every time he says the words. “I think she’d like some roses, maybe on either side of the porch steps. If you have any advice, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’d certainly be glad to help.” She begins to think about whether any of her varietals would be good candidates for cutting and replanting.

They are at the front steps now. Steve says, “Are you sure that I can’t sit with you? Just until the ambulance gets here?”

She is so close to her own house that if she balanced correctly, she could reach out and turn the doorknob right now. She could likely bring herself inside and handle everything on her own, without this man she’s only just met, although she knows so much about him already. But her house will be so quiet and Joanie isn’t scheduled to call until next week, so instead she says, “Well, I wouldn’t want to take you away from your party, but I might appreciate some company.”

“I think I have a compromise, then.”

Moments later, after Steve has supported her down her front path, across the cul-de-sac, up his own walkway and front steps, he opens the door and calls, “Peg?”

Peggy breaks away from a conversation and comes over to the doorway. “I was wondering what happened to you. I wouldn’t put it past you to get into a situation at the convenience store.”

“The situation was a bit more local, I’m afraid,” Dr. Oglethorpe says dryly, extending her ankle as delicately as she can. It’s swollen and beginning to bruise quite spectacularly.

“Well, we can certainly help with that,” Peggy says. There’s a distinct air about her as if she’d say the same thing if someone had arrived on her doorstep with a bucket of nuclear waste or a grenade with the pin out. She opens the door wider and Steve makes himself small so they can both fit inside without jarring anything.

She’d never been inside the original house - the couple who’d last lived there, back in the eighties, had been flighty and barely stayed there a year before they ran out of money and left the house to molder in care of the bank - but what Steve and Peggy have done is marvelous. The big windows let in the remaining sun, lighting up the polished wood floors and the banister of the staircase which leads majestically upward. The large living room to the left and the dining room to the right are filled with chattering people and trays of food.

“Shove over,” Peggy says politely to a man seated in one of the living room armchairs. “We need the chair.” Dr. Oglethorpe realizes with a start that it is the shaggy-haired man, cleaned and pressed for the occasion.

“I’m so sorry,” she says automatically, keeping hold of Peggy’s arm. She can’t quite remember when she was moved from Steve’s charge into Peggy’s. “What a nuisance.”

“He can be quite a nuisance himself,” Peggy assures her, and the man smiles as they settle Dr. Oglethorpe into the chair. “Bucky, this is Dr. Oglethorpe. She lives across the street.”

Dr. Oglethorpe shakes his hand, barely noticing the strange prosthesis on full display as she finally puts a name to the person she’s known for months now. She looks around the party and realizes how familiar these people are, these people who have put in time and muscle and love into making a home for Steve and Peggy. There’s the redhead who fixed nearly the whole porch on her own and keeps glancing at it with satisfaction, and the black man who patiently climbed up and down a ladder over the course of several days, moving it incrementally around the house as Peggy pointed out areas where the paint needed to be fixed. Standing far across the room, telling an animated story, is the father of the three children, who made all the lights work after an electrical fiasco. (He, too, looks somehow familiar. Is he perhaps a television personality? She doesn’t watch with any frequency, and can’t see very well regardless so she can’t be sure.) 

Steve walks back into the room holding a phone, and some of his less melted ice in a bag covered in a towel. As he comes to hand it to her, he says, “I just called the ambulance, Dr. Oglethorpe, but like I said, they might be a while,” and she rests her palm on his wrist. “Please, call me Valerie,” she tells him. “We are neighbors, after all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt was "Domestic Bliss," which I got kind of literally here, as it's centered around a domicile, but the family element is there, too.
> 
> There's a house that I pass on my way to the bus in the afternoon that's been under seemingly amateur construction for at least six months, but every time I pass by, I hear people laughing from inside.


End file.
